5 Things The Hobbit Movies Spent Money On

The Lord of the Rings trilogy movies were amazing, both story wise and visually. Peter Jackson did one hell of a job with these movies. I myself can say that I have watched the movies a bunch of times and still find them great and entertaining.

The Hobbit movies not that much since they were kind of milking it from only one book. Not to mention that they cost a lot. Once you see the movies you begin to wonder on what exactly was that money spent on. Once you will see the list, you will definitely find it way too ridiculous. Here is a list of 5 things The Hobbit Movies Spent Money On.

1. $2 million went on per Book Page

Ok imagine this, one book that made 3 whole movies. There were not a lot of pages, a rough number of 424 pages, this includes the book plus the appendices. The last Hobbit movie was about 144 minutes long so that means around 53 pages per hour. The difference here is that on the original Lord of the Rings trilogy we are looking at 122 pages per hour from a total of 1,137 pages.

All the three Hobbit movies had about $740 million budget so that means about $240 million per movie. Doing some simple math this will give us around $2 million spent per page. This is crazy don’t you think?

2. Advertising

All movies set a certain budget for advertising and they spend more if they think the movie will be a blockbuster. This is what happened with The Hobbit trilogy as well. It is estimated that they have spent around 155 million dollars only on advertising the movies. Just to make a point, it is more expensive than the whole cost of production for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The funny part is that they even shot a video for airline companies regarding safety, you can see Frodo talking about what you need to do while flying. This is way too much.

3. Unique characters

If you think the airline commercial was enough, think again. The budget was also spent on pimping out the dwarves. Each had highly maintenance wigs and beards made from the finest yak hair. All dwarves have used a total 547 weapon props. But hey, it’s all for the sake of authenticity. Who can forget these dwarves? I for one cannot tell them apart. They pretty much look the same to me, one uglier than the other.

4. 3D High Frames

The Hobbit franchise tried to approach a unique way of making movies by using 48 frames per second technology. Of course, this was pretty expensive and in reality the visual impact is not that great. Some people actually got sick and dizzy when they watched the movies in HD. I chose to watch the normal 3D version.

5. CGI Effects

I have no words for how disappointed I was when I saw this CGI abomination. They forced CGI scenes to remind us how cool the scenery is in New Zeeland. Instead of the actual nature, actors were placed behind green walls. Why spend some money on the actual location when you can stay behind big green walls and spend even more for the unnatural look the CGI provided.

Lord of the Rings did a great job in transporting us to the realm of Middle Earth. The scenes, the places, just thinking about them now makes we want to watch them again. One great example is what they did for the amazing view of Rivendell. They used a miniature version and sprinkled a bit of CGI. It made the view astonishing. I wanted to move there.

On the other hand The Hobbit movies went all out to spend money on full CGI effects that looked so bad, you kind of had the impulse to look away and wait for certain scenes to be over.

Don’t get me started on the orcs. In The Lords of the Rings they were pretty scary, real and bad ass. In The Hobbit, not that much. They received a full CGI makeover and destroyed all their appeal. Sadly these Hobbit movies can only be watched once and it is enough.

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About Fred Mitchell

I like midnight surfing and going for jogs at sunrise with my my golden retriever, Charlie. When I'm not studying Russian literature or reading Dostoievski, you can find me playing video games like Witcher 3 or Battlefield Hardline, or hanging out in Starbucks sipping an Americano. I never leave the house without my phone and saying I am a social media addict would definitely not be an understatement.